Jeanne realized that there was still some one with her, she felt for
an instant less unhappy. She took the doll in her arms and embraced it
ardently, while its head swung back, for its neck was broken. Then she
chattered away to it, telling it that it was Jeanne's best-behaved
friend, that it had a good heart, for it never went out and left
Jeanne alone. It was, said she, her treasure, her kitten, her dear
little pet. Trembling with agitation, striving to prevent herself from
weeping again, she covered it all over with kisses.

This fit of tenderness gave her some revengeful consolation, and the
doll fell over her arm like a bundle of rags. She rose and looked out,
with her forehead against a window-pane. The rain had ceased falling,
and the clouds of the last downpour, driven before the wind, were
nearing the horizon towards the heights of Pere-Lachaise, which were
wrapped in gloom; and against this stormy background Paris, illumined
by a uniform clearness, assumed a lonely, melancholy grandeur. It
seemed to be uninhabited, like one of those cities seen in a
nightmare--the reflex of a world of death. To Jeanne it certainly
appeared anything but pretty. She was now idly dreaming of those she
had loved since her birth. Her oldest sweetheart, the one of her early
days at Marseilles, had been a huge cat, which was very heavy; she
would clasp it with her little arms, and carry it from one chair to
another without provoking its anger in the least; but it had
disappeared, and that was the first misfortune she remembered. She had
next had a sparrow, but it died; she had picked it up one morning from
the bottom of its cage. That made two. She never reckoned the toys
which got broken just to grieve her, all kinds of wrongs which had
caused her much suffering because she was so sensitive. One doll in
particular, no higher than one's hand, had driven her to despair by
getting its head smashed; she had cherished it to a such a degree that
she had buried it by stealth in a corner of the yard; and some time
afterwards, overcome by a craving to look on it once more, she had
disinterred it, and made herself sick with terror whilst gazing on its
blackened and repulsive features.

However, it was always the others who were the first to fail in their
love. They got broken; they disappeared. The separation, at all
events, was invariably their fault. Why was it? She herself never
changed. When she loved any one, her love lasted all her lif